Service management organizations are beginning to focus on improvements, principally on service delivery and the type of services that are being delivered. This is being driven by a shift in consumer demand from products to services to, now, value delivery. This is known as “value-as-a-service.”

This one component – delivering value to an organization’s customer – is just a tiny part of providing excellent service. Despite all the efforts around service, and even value delivery, there is still a long way to go to gain true integration while the service environment continues to change dramatically. For this reason alone, achieving service excellence should be an organizational focus, where organizational leadership works toward a culture of service excellence.

Enterprise service management is already a reality in many organizations and will be even more so in the future. But if that’s true, why does it feel like a very ancient story indeed: building the tower of Babel?

Breaking down silos in organizations by working together with different service departments has a lot of benefits. Most of all, enterprise service management helps you improve your customer experience while increasing efficiency at the same time. Sounds great, but is it worth the hassle it causes when departments don’t see eye to eye?

A very common hurdle in improving the collaboration between departments is that they don’t speak the same language. Facilities and IT don’t mean the same thing when they talk about an incident, and HR and finance use different terminology altogether, which leads to misunderstandings. For instance, when IT departments talk about an incident there is no stress related to it, but in a facilities context an “incident” most likely means the building is on fire or something of that severity, not to mention what an incident implies in an HR context.

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ITSMIT LeadershipIDG Contributor Network: ITIL and agile are not always the best of friends, but they sure are not enemiesTue, 06 Mar 2018 04:00:00 -0800Nancy Van Elsacker LouisnordNancy Van Elsacker Louisnord

Agile service management means applying the agile mindset to IT service management, a concept that is as simple as that. Take into account, though, that this is not something that has often been done yet, and as simple as the concept may be, you will be pioneering the effort if you take it on. And even though at first sight, agile sounds quite opposite to the strict ITIL processes, they can work together pretty well.

The agile methodology is created with four foundational pillars in mind. The pillars are built on the core values of agile development, and need only a minor adjustment to also accommodate IT service management:

We are in an everything-as-a-service era. The shift from product to service delivery originated in the B2C world, but quickly spread to the B2B world. For example, take the services provided by Spotify or Apple Music instead of consumers purchasing products like CDs, or the example of our being able to purchase Wi-Fi coverage instead of buying routers. As customers, most of us don’t want to think about what is necessary to get something done, we just want it done. Let me provide a common illustration. When you fly on an airplane you never have to think about procuring the plane, the required fuel, contracting a pilot, leasing runway space, adding food and beverage to the plane; instead you simply buy a ticket from the air carrier of your choice and board at the appointed time to get you to the scheduled destination.

I admit I don’t remember much from the English literature classes I’ve taken, but somehow the quote from Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, has always stayed at the top of my mind. “What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Working in an IT environment where things are constantly evolving, and frameworks or new software pop up like mushrooms, I believe that the way we name solutions and tools sometimes matters more than we realize. Let me explain, taking “enterprise service management” as an example.

Service management principles have evolved beyond just IT processes, as was their primary purpose in the past. Where other departments, such as HR and facilities, have always offered services, they were not so used to using frameworks or principles to manage that service delivery whereas in IT, that has been the case. We’ve started to see adoption of ITSM concepts or ITIL at other departments throughout organizations. Thus, the name “enterprise service management” was born.